Happy Halloween

A Halloween film that's been around since 2006, but still just as great every year:

The Life and Death of a Pumpkin by Blame Society Productions

Directed by Aaron Yonda, Pumpkin voiced by Matt Sloan

Viewer Discretion is Advised =)

Winner in Best Short Film and Best Concept categories, 2006 Chicago Horror Film Festival

BImber Books

I discovered some amazing handmade books over the weekend at an arts and crafts exhibit in Southwestern Virginia. These gorgeous mixed media creations were built by Becca Imbur.

I love the idea of books as art, and I absolutely think any book can count as "art." From a gleaming, gold leafed collector's edition to the most worn, tattered favorite copy with notes scribbled in the margins. Becca Imbur has elevated the idea of books as art to an extremely vibrant, graphic level, and her pieces are visual masterpieces inside and out.

With colorful pages, beautiful textiles, and whimsical details, I don't know how anyone could actually write in them, but if you could make yourself do so, they certainly would be inspirational journals. I have a couple bound journals that have been given to me over the years but which I feel are too pretty to write in (and they're nothing close to these), so I never have; hence depriving the books of their function and rendering them purposeless, which when you think about it that way seems kind of sad for them. What is a book without its contents?

These spectacular pieces would also be great for travel scrapbooks (as long as you have a big budget for your scrapbooking hobby--these journals are expensive), and a lot of the patterns would look very pretty under ink drawings or even watercolors. They were a lot of fun to flip through, I only wish the exhibit had had more of them (there are some beautiful ones on the BImber Books website!) I also think this would make a pretty awesome project for a personalized journal or scrapbook--I'm going to have to look into papermaking and book binding now!

Open Access Week

So I've nearly missed it, but I still wanted to throw link up here for Open Access Week (October 24-30, 2011). Open Access Week exists to promote and share the benefits of Open Access policies and publication with scholars and researchers around the world. Definitely a worthy cause.

For example take Open Office: a great program that includes word processing, spreadsheets and databases, presentation, and even drawing functions. So basically, all the essentials. I've never been a big fan of Microsoft Office (I especially detest Excel), and since I discovered Open Office I have started using it for just about everything. It's simple and straightforward and I think it would be an easy transition for Mac or PC users. If you're interested, give it a try!

Shredder Challenge

DARPA, the ones who brought us the $40,000 Red Balloon Hunt two years ago, has recently opened up a new challenge carrying an even bigger price tag. On October 27th five puzzles were released online, each puzzle consists of a series of screenshots of shredded document fragments. The goal, to reassemble the pieces and and solve the problem hidden within the reconstructed document. The payoff, $50,000 for you or your team. We typically think of shredding as a pretty permanent form of destruction; however, when you shred a document the contents may be difficult to read, but the information is more or less still there.

Why is DARPA giving away $50,000 to the talented decoder who solves their puzzles? Dan Kaufman, director of the Information Innovation Office, is predicting that the winner of the Shredder Challenge is likely to use techniques or technologies previously unexplored by DARPA researchers. Ultimately the hope is to gain insight into the process of document reconstruction which could be applied both to reviving destroyed documents in war zones where troops often come across remnants of enemy data and to protecting sensitive information used and shredded by United States security offices. According to Kaufman, “the ability to reconstruct shredded documents will potentially yield information that may save lives or offer critical information about an adversary’s plans. Currently, this process is much too slow and too labor-intensive, particularly if the documents are handwritten. We are looking to the Shredder Challenge to generate some leap-ahead thinking in this area.”

So whether it's by manual assembly or computer program, if you want to give your method a try, get started at the Shredder Challenge website. We're on the second day of the challenge now, but I don't think there has been must talk about successful applicants quite yet. In the Red Balloon Challenge, a group from MIT located the balloons to complete the task in less than nine hours, but it's always difficult to predict how much time a DARPA challenge will actually take. DARPA plans to reveal the winner of the Shredder Challenge on December 5, 2011.

An awesome-sounding project to be sure, though I don't think I'm smart enough to actually have a shot at it. It's neat that they (DARPA) are willing to look outside their usual research team for ideas and innovations. Good luck to anyone entering!

Follow Shredder Challenge updates on Twitter
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) main website

In 60 seconds

A cool image of activity on the Internet!

(click to enlarge)

www.go-globe.com

Blogger plus Google+

I'm not sure how I feel about this. Apparently, Google is taking steps to integrate Blogger with their rising starlet, Google+. It sounds all well and good on the surface, but the big issue is undoubtedly going to be the strict requirement on Google+ that all accounts be registered under the real name of the user. On Blogger this has definitely not been the standard; writers enjoy the freedom to create accounts under Internet aliases while commenters can post replies completely anonymously. And I can't see people changing their opinions about that anytime soon. Google's current response to this hitch is a shrug and the comment that combining your Blogger and Google+ profiles may not be for you right now. But will the day come when integration is mandatory? The rumor in circulation right now is that Google is considering adapting their Google+ policy to allow users to register under nicknames or pseudonyms. The last thing Google wants to do is lose customers, especially since Blogger has such a huge user base.

This issue of real names aside, I'm still not sure I think the integration is such a terrific idea. Yes, it presents a powerful and effortless way to disseminate your blog posts, but will all your contacts on Google+ appreciate the possibly overwhelming stream of blog entries arriving from everyone in their circle?

I have always thought that the truly great thing about blogs is the opportunity they provide to put your thoughts "out there" on the Internet, available to any reader who might be interested, but not in a way that forces your posts down the throats of anyone in particular. Maybe the integrated Google+ and Blogger will have options for filtering out contacts' Blogger updates if you don't want them showing up all the time, but I don't know that that is really a good solution either. We'll just have to wait and see.

Socrates on the written word

A couple days ago I touched on the subject of how some people worry that excessive use of Google,  smartphones, and similar technology assistance is inherently making us less intelligent. Well apparently Socrates had similar concerns thousands of years ago over the spread of the written word to nearly every facet of life, and particularly when it was used to support, or replace, human memory. So maybe it's just our natural human trepidation of change and whatever is new showing up again and again. We're so predictable.

"Socrates, for example, was skeptical of writing, fearing that 'it will implant forgetfulness' in the human mind, offering 'no true wisdom... but only its semblance... Written words... seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent,' the philosopher said, 'but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you the same thing forever.'"

Quoted from: O'Toole, James M. "On the Idea of Permanence." American Archivist 52, no. 1 (1989): 10-25.